Dragons in the news

HERE BE DRAGONS is an entertaining survey of dragon mythology by Rouwen Lin in the Malaysia Star. Excerpts of interest:

The Sumerian and Babylonian dragon myths, symbolising the creation of order out of chaos, were the earliest to surface, with written records going back several thousand years BC.

“Their myth was of a dragon – symbolising chaos – being defeated by a god, who thereafter proceeded to create the world, largely out of parts of the dismembered dragon. The dragon in question was vast, ferocious, had a scaly body, horns and claws. These are also generally the features of later dragons,” says tropical marine biologist Peter Hogarth, who is retired, but was until recently a senior lecturer in Biology at the University of York, Britain.

[...]

In Beowulf, the earliest Germanic epic, and The Saga Of The Volsungs, a later Norse prose mythical saga based on early materials, the dragons show influence from the classical Roman and Greek dragon myths (which were in turn influenced by ancient Semitic, near-eastern and biblical dragon concepts). Also, the dragon-like creatures of Egyptian myths and in the most ancient sources in the Western European tradition do not have wings – “so one can say that Western dragons acquired their wings from the Asian myths,” he adds.

[Robert] Miller [II, S.F.O., associate professor of Old Testament at The Catholic University of America] points out that the biblical dragons are clearly derived from the ancient Near Eastern dragon myths of ancient Israel’s neighbours.

“There are many, many connections in the words used and images involved that show Israel knew the dragon myths of ancient Mesopotamia (Iraq) and the Canaanites (their neighbours in the Levant). Israel used these myths in different ways in the Bible; they either co-opted the dragon slaying myth of some other god or they demoted the dragon to an ordinary (if rather large) animal.”

[...]

“The Old Testament doesn’t have a devil with a pitchfork to symbolise evil; it has a dragon. The Bible says God ‘slew the dragon’ to articulate God’s total power over evil personified,” says Miller.

Evan adds: “The saint doing combat with the dragon symbolises the cosmic or spiritual battle of the divine forces of God against the demonic, diabolical, or satanic forces of evil. In the end, the biblical tradition says, the dragon Satan will be destroyed and all evil will be destroyed with it.”

Dragons figure prominently in some earlier PaleoJudaica posts here, here (the link to the Times article has rotted, sorry), here, here, here, and here.